Kevin Sullivan, right, and chemist Zia Ziaullah in the lab at Appili Therapeutics, a drug development company that just announced that it had been awarded a US $1.2-million grant from the United States Department of Defence.

Earlier this week, Halifax-based anti-infective drug development company Appili Therapeutics Inc announced it had been awarded a US $1.2-million grant from the United States Defence Department to aid in drug research.

The funds were given to Appili after it had applied to the U.S. department’s peer-reviewed medical research program.

It was a gutsy move on the part of Appili, a company that’s only been around for a couple of years.

“We applied and it was a peer-reviewed process,” said company CEO Kevin Sullivan. “It was good for us because it’s on our earlier-stage negamycin analogues program and so much of what we do around that program, and insights that we have and the work that we have are trade secrets and proprietary.

“It is difficult to get out and talk to people about what we are doing in the laboratory,” Sullivan said in an interview Thursday. “So this was an opportunity to pull the veil back, so to speak, and have experts look at what our rationale for our research is and why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

He doesn’t know how many Canadian-based companies receive funding from the U.S. government but that’s not an important point in the war against infectious diseases.

The U.S. Defence Department is one of the biggest funders of infectious disease research, Sullivan said, because infectious diseases can pose a threat to both soldiers and civilians.

“They’ve taken a pretty serious role in the global infectious disease mix and this is just one of the army’s funds along with National Institutes of Health and Defence Threat Reduction Agency — all U.S. government organizations — that will have different roles for both civilians and defence applications,” he said. “They are big funders of infectious disease research and so, as a company that focuses on infectious disease, we’re grateful for the work that they do in the space.”

Appili will use the funds to develop a compound as a pre-clinical candidate for ATI-1503 antibiotic program targeting drug-resistant gram-negative bacteria, the company stated in an earlier news release.

“From the very beginning we looked to develop a pipeline of ‘balanced risk’ assets,” he explained. When the company was just forming there were no programs in-house and it was simply a collaboration among Sullivan, an investment bank in Toronto, and Appili’s now-vice-president of drug development, Jamie Doran.

“We were looking to find assets that had a faster-to-revenue potential. Things that could move to market quickly,” Sullivan said. “You may have noticed recently our ATI-1501 received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to enter the clinic and we’ve now dosed our first patients in our clinical study. So the clinical study is underway.”

Appili hopes to bring that product to market quickly with a new drug application filing in 2018 and market approval in 2019, he said.

The ATI-1501 is actually a reformulation for an existing drug which people have difficulty swallowing.

“It is for a drug called metronidazole. In the U.S. alone, 9.5 million prescriptions for metronidazole are written every year,” Sullivan said. “Most people can take metronidazole without any issues but it tends to be a challenge to take for both children and adults with swallowing issues, which happens to be a fair number of adults.”

He added that metronidazole was ranked as the worst-tasting antibiotic on the market.

In long-term care facilities, up to 68 per cent of residents have dysphagia or difficulty swallowing, and that is an awful lot of patients, Sullivan said. “We actually created a taste-mask liquid oral suspension with the help of some formulation scientists we brought in and now that’s in its first clinical study.”

The drug being tested fights anaerobic bacterial infections, including Clostridium difficile, more commonly referred to as C. difficile. C. difficile is really problematic in long-term care facilities because it creates spores and is really hard to eradicate from a facility, he said.

One of the advantages of a liquid oral suspension is it will help patients to comply with their medicine so they can clear the infection properly, Sullivan said, and reduce the chance of a reoccurrence of the infection. That will help remove the infectious bacteria from the long-term care facility or hospital.

Appili Therapeutics has grown from two to 14 employees within the past 18 months, and the company has recently advertised for another person to join the team.